ALEXANDER RODCHENKO – JUMP

DIEHL together with Glaz gallery from Moscow are proud to present a selection of works by Alexander Rodchenko.

Rodchenko fell in love with photography in 1920s, seeing it as a new media more suitable to the needs of Revolution than drawing or sculpture. He started with using photographs as part of his famous photomontages, but later began to take pictures himself, playing with soon to become famous unconventional angles and unexpected compositions. No doubt, those experiments made an important contribution to European art of the 1920s.

We’ve included both his most famous works as well as more rare prints in this exhibition. Also, we’ve tried showing all the angles of his photography experiences – from straightforward portraits, like ”Portrait of Mother”, done in 1924 to his well-known angles in “Fire escape” (1925) and “Pioneer with the horn” (1930). “Morning exercises”, a series done in 1930 on the roof of the building in Lefortovo, Moscow with athletes is less known but depicts perfectly his studies of human body, movement and geometry.
Only one photo in the show was not done by Rodchenko, but we’ve decided to include it anyway because it shows 4 of the most prominent artists of Rodchenko’s time. “4 giants” with Vladimir Mayakovsky, Alexander Rodchenko, Vsevolod Meyerhold and Dmitry Shostakovich gives us a perfect understanding of creative energy that Rodchenko was part of and era that he represented.

Most of the prints left after Rodchenko’s death in 1956 are now in biggest museum collections (such as Museum of Modern Art, New York; Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow; Pushkin Museum of Fine arts, Moscow and others), so gathering such an amount of prints for the gallery show was not easy. Some of them come directly from the family, others – from private collections, but all of them are checked with the family for proof of authenticity and clarification of provenance.